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Sunday, October 7, 2012

Using the war against Women to Abolish Liberty Part I

There really is a war against Women. Of course you'll never hear most of the folks prosecuting it admit it. This is because they need women to vote for them.

This is nothing new ....When the USA first was created, our elites were involved in a struggle to create a republic that would give them power, but were also trying to avoid a return to aristocracy and monarchy. The Right likes to portray our founders as being clear on the subjects they were arguing, but they weren't. They extolled democracy, and lamblasted it, at the same time. What they wanted was a system that would embody rule of law, protect their contracts with the government and each other, and protect themselves against both the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of emerging aristocrats. Events in the USA like the Shays revolution terrified them, and the French Revolution sent some of them into fits of apoplexy. They often were pushing back against the people, even as they sought to manipulate people into keeping them in office. This is still true to this very day. They couldn't get elected unless they found a way to link their special interest with their victims own interest.

Thus it was that Southern Slave Holders were able to enlist poor, non-slave owning, whites - who couldn't compete with the wages paid to skilled blacks - to help them protect their "peculiar institution" and then later got the descendents of those same people to help them create a regime of terror and oppression that also was used to oppress working white folks. Folks identify with the wealthy and powerful. In this country they think that "one day they'll be rich and powerful." Folks let the powerful transfer their narrow expertise in conning people and making money into the idea that the folks who have those attributes are also wise and experts on things totally unrelated. Thus demagoguery and business go together in our society whether we are talking about religious politics, business politics or business politics. You can talk about "welfare queens driving Cadillacs" and folks will believe what you are saying even if others think you are nuts. It's called "coded language" and it works like a dog whistle for those whose fears are tuned into the notes being sounded. Fear makes people band together, and our right has been expert at manipulating people for a long time.

So there is a lot of coded language within the right in this day, because the power model hasn't changed... When the right goes after an issue, the goal is power, and the main goal of that power is "private, separate interest" of the private actors who constitute the wannabe aristocrats of the Republican party. They may not be literal teabaggers, but their goals involve teabagging people, including the people they convince to support them.

So the war on women isn't really a war on women. It is just another way to use dog whistles and coded language to keep, project and extend power, for the folks who want to be oligarchs in this country, and at this point, have acquired the kind of power to let them exercise oligarchic powers. But it is a real war nonetheless. When Romney talks about "life starting at conception" he is appealing to people's emotions on behalf of laws aimed at locking down women's rights.

If a fertilized human egg is “alive,” as many of my Christian friends claim to believe, so are the ovum and spermatozoa constituting it. If the latter be not so, then secular evolutionists must be right: Life can be created from life-less stuff.

So if the religious literalists get their way then:

Accordingly, if a conceptus is a “person,” as many believe, then its constituent parts must be alive or, at the very least, “quasi-persons,” likely deserving of equal protection under the law.

And he notes it gets worse. Nothing that Leviticus condemns masturbation, so if life is defined to begin at conception and sperm and eggs are defined as persons, then conceivably masturbation could once again be a criminalized activity. This could lead to a lot of men getting locked up. Hooray for Prison industries! But seriously, life at conception is mainly targeted at women:

"First, we should insist that the proper health and medical authorities investigate the facts of every miscarriage occurring anytime near the now-mystical, medically unjustified, 20th week of an expected 36-week-long pregnancy in order to satisfy ourselves that the miscarriage was not, in fact, induced."

So, witch hunts here we come!

"Second, we should insure that 100 percent of all miscarriages are reported to the Alabama Departments of Health, Records, et cetera, for data maintenance of death statistics; to proper law-enforcement agencies for information purposes; to the newspapers for obituary purposes; and to the funeral homes of choice for the purpose of picking up and delivering the remains prior to the funeral. Moreover, if the fetus is a person, in fact, why are we not now reporting such news routinely? Could it be because most people, in fact, don’t consider miscarriages to “really be the death of a person,” thereby requiring such, preferring to deal with their grief in private ways?"

Oh, yes, and not to mention criminalizing birth control and even efforts to control menstration. Keep the women at home! And it would be a boon to newspapers:

"Third, we should insist that the survivors, those responsible for creating the “person” who’s just died, be issued a birth as well as a death certificate, identifying the “person” by name and the cause of death."

But of course that all shows why even Christian folks with common sense used to have common law ideas about conception and abortion:

"It’s easy to see why the common law, historically, has not tried to identify the moment of conception or fertilization (since there isn’t one), which terms are not even precisely or consistently synonymous in medical dictionaries, and why it opted to define a legally protected fetal interest as arising at viability, the new thinking of our “activist” highest state court to the contrary notwithstanding. It’s just as easy to see why, while reading statutes purportedly based upon identifying when life begins and so when “personhood” arises, the above-stated list of “horrors” now includes as well as new ones born of religious zealotry, such as requirements for “transvaginal” or other sonar examinations before legal abortions."

But of course, as the author notes:

"After all, just as the state once had the legal right to restrain and retain black citizens as slaves, now the very men who usually decry the “intrusive hand of big government” into our lives seek to assert the legal right to intrude literally into the sanctity of a woman’s womb to enslave any zygote found there. Defining a one-celled, virtually invisible to the naked eye, conceptus as a “person” or a “baby” leads one to all sorts of strange places. If you, Dear Reader, are a self-described “pro-life” person, which we all are, why should not what is written above become standard operating procedure?"

Okay, with all that, there is still a war on women going on. And the absurd effort to define life starting at conception is part of it. Think I'm joking? Romney is for it:

"Akin, Ryan and others are original cosponsors of HR 3, which sought – before a public outcry prompted a reversal – to create a legal difference between “rape” and “forcible rape.” The bill still eliminates tax breaks for health insurance premiums on policies that cover abortion-related expenses and prevents women from paying for an abortion from a health savings account. A complete explanation of the bill from the Christian Science Monitor is available at http://bit.ly/Rxg8HN."